Vision

Three simple sentences define our ministry vision: Experience God. Relate Spiritually. Live Meaningfully. Many Christian churches use these kinds of slogans. Here is what we mean.

Experience God. The most important event, the event where the believer comes to most fully experience God in all his glory is corporate worship. This is where we learn who God is and we come to recognize his work in our lives. We encounter God by his words in the Christian Bible. So our services are intentionally God-oriented, wanting to draw the mind of the participant toward Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This, we believe, is the most relevant sort of Christian worship. It is this experience of God that the elders lead and the congregation ministers toward.

Relate Spiritually. By stressing the unity that we have in Christ, we diminish the differences that we have. Racial differences, socio-economic differences, tradition differences, even gender differences—these are not unimportant, but they are not core. “Christ is all and in all” (Col 3:11). So we seek to live out our unity in Christ, a unity that the Spirit has produced. We do this by seeking to welcome, care for and sacrificially serve every member of the body—poor and rich, old and young, male and female. We also enjoy the ministry of the congregation in Grace Groups. These small groups gather every other week to build each member up (edification) and cause us to think and live more like Christ (sanctification). In these groups, godly leaders lead great conversations centered on the truth of Scripture and all the Grace Group members pray for each other and look for ways to serve one another. These are relationships that MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter cannot duplicate.

Live Meaningfully. Jonathan Edwards resolved very young, to live in such a way that when he came to die he could look back on his life without regret. With this glorious end (and beginning) in view, we seek to daily meditate on some truth from Scripture, seeking to see ourselves and our world from God’s angle. We seek to daily pray for someone in our body. We seek to rub shoulders with non-Christians in hopes of bringing them to Christ. We seek to work hard for God’s pleasure at our sacred callings, to enjoy God’s gifts with thanksgiving and in moderation, and to invest our money in kingdom purposes.

This is the best life imaginable. Experiencing God, relating spiritually, and living meaningfully.